Background

The Tohoku earthquake and associated tsunami in March 2011 caused a severe nuclear accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, where level 7 (International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) – INES scale) meltdown at three reactors occurred. The underestimation of the seismic and tsunami hazards has been recognized and the seismic margins assessment of the nuclear facilities remains a priority for the whole nuclear community.

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In this framework a five-year research project called SINAPS@ (Earthquake and Nuclear Facilities: Improving and Sustaining Safety) is currently on-going in France partly funded by the French government. A reliable estimate of seismic margins is possible only if all uncertainties, epistemic and aleatory, are effectively identified, quantified and integrated in the seismic risk analysis. SINAPS@ brings together a multidisciplinary community of researchers and engineers from the academic and the nuclear world. SINAPS@ aims at exploring the uncertainties associated to databases, physical processes and methods used at each stage of the seismic risk assessment in a safety approach (i.e. seismic hazard, site effects, soil and structure interaction, structural and nuclear components vulnerability). The main objective is ultimately to identify the sources of potential seismic margins resulting from assumptions or when selecting the seismic design level or the design strategy. The whole project is built around an “integrating” work package enabling to test state-of-the-art practices and to challenge new methodologies for seismic risk assessment: the real case of Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Japanese nuclear plant, shocked by the severe earthquake in 2007 provided a rich dataset which will be used to compare with the predictions.

A first training session took place at the French “Ecole de Physique des Houches”in may 2016: this training has benefited 50 PhD students, post-doctoral and young researchers or engineers. All the topics of seismic risk analysis in the framework of nuclear safety were presented through plenary courses and practical exercises. This 2016 session has been, from the training team (composed by researchers, engineers and experts in the field of nuclear safety) and the participants completely successful and very rich in terms of scientific and human exchanges.

A second training session will be held on Porquerolles, an island located in Southern France, from April 23th to 27th, 2018. This session is open to the international audience, and will be an opportunity to present the state of the art of the Seismic Risk Analysis, in particular in a seismic safety context (for structures related to high issues), but also to discuss and illustrate recent innovative data, models and methods as developed in SINAPS@ project. See details, objectives and contents of the session below.

Objectives and Content of the SINAPS@ International Training Course

The objectives of the 2018 SINAPS@ Training session are:

to get a large international audience, composed by young and experienced scientists, engineers and professionals involved in the seismic risk analysis, for conventional or specific buildings (such as dams, chemical or nuclear sites…),

to propose a strong training team, merging all the scientific specialties interacting when assessing the seismic risk for a sensitive building or equipment, from the field geology, to the seismology, the geotechnical and civil engineering, and the probabilistic approach experts,

to expose the state of the art in each topic of the full risk analysis topic,

to present and discuss the current classical “engineering approaches” in line with the regulatory references,

to underline the current scientific debates and/or challenges,

to present and illustrate on case-studies, experimental seismic campaigns or through simulations, at the forefront of innovation, as recently developed, experienced or validated in the frame of SINAPS@ project,

to motivate scientific debates but also practical issues between trainers and participants.

With its organization in plenary sessions and specialized modules, the training aims to provide to all participants a common high level of knowledge of current practices in seismic risk analysis, and an in-depth presentation of most recent findings and developments coming from ongoing research.